Autonomous vehicles will be part of road traffic in the foreseeable future. In such autonomous vehicles, it is not necessary for a driver to be present in the vehicle. This also eliminates the monitoring function of the driver. It is therefore necessary to monitor the function of the autonomous vehicle and its systems automatically.
If a defect occurs in an autonomous vehicle, which prevents autonomous driving, two fundamentally different cases must be distinguished: In the first case, the system is still capable of communicating with the infrastructure. In this case, the system of the autonomous vehicle itself is able to transmit a message in order to inform the owner about the defect and/or to get help. In the second case, the system is so defective that it is no longer able itself to transmit such a message.
It is therefore desirable to improve the monitoring of the operation of an autonomous vehicle in such a way that the defect is reported even in the second case.